


The Expanding Universe

by miabicicletta



Series: Space and Time [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: AU, Crossover, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-28
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 01:50:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2211210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miabicicletta/pseuds/miabicicletta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The AU where instead of getting engaged to a consulting detective lookalike, Molly went off and found herself a Time Lord.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Expanding Universe

**Author's Note:**

> Molly & Eleven: timey-wimey, intergalactic besties. Lots of silly references in here. +10 to Ravenclaw for all the geeky nods you can spot. Warning: fun abounds. And, as always, spoilers.

||

Sherlock Holmes has been gone for two months when a flouncy-haired hipster in a bowtie wanders backwards out of an alley half a block from Barts directly into Molly Hooper’s path and knocks her straight to the ground.

“Oi! Sorry!” Flouncy Hair says, attempting to help her up.

Molly shakes herself off and climbs inelegantly to her feet. “It’s fine. Are you okay?”

“Okay. Okay _plus_. Really am sorry, though. I didn’t see you there. Should have. Would have but my eyes were wandering, I suppose. Have to follow them. Be a bit strange, letting them go around on their own.”

_What?_

“Um, don’t worry about it,” she says, brushing a bit of late winter sleet off her trousers. She waves him off, hoping he’ll head wherever he was going in such a state of hurry. At home are her jams and wine and a book, all of which she’s desperate for after this day, this month, this whole sodding year. She’s just worn thin, like thumbs of her pink gloves are these days. “Bit used to it.”

“How do you mean?”

Molly swipes more dirty snow off her bag and checks to make sure her mobile isn’t broken. “Hmm?” she responds, not really listening.

He steps a little closer. Not threatening like, he just squints as though he’s...trying to make something out? “You said you were used to it? What is it you are used to, exactly?”

Her phone chirps.

 _Oh thank god_. Mobile not broken.

“Oh, you know. Just...not being seen. I sometimes feel a bit like wallpaper around here. Not often people notice me.”

Has she got something on her face? He stares at her _so_ intently, like he’s never seen someone like her before.

“ _I_ noticed you.”

“Sure, after you ran me over,” Molly quips at the bugger, who has the nerve to grin.

“Point.” He cocks his head, bounces on his toes. “What’s your name?”

“Ah, um, Molly. Molly Hooper.”

Little smile. “Well, Molly Hooper, I’m seeing you. And what would _you_ like to see, eh? How about the Year 10,000? Bit hot and crowdy, then, but always a good time. How about extrasolar worlds or queens of the stone age?”

Her nose scrunches. Bit funny, this one. “What, like the band? Are you a musician or something?”

“No. Yes! Well, depends on who you ask, s’pose. Opened for Stevie Wonder once. Not a big deal. Just a little show. _Wembley_. Sometimes play a gig or two with my old pal Bruce. Help him write a few tunes, now and again.” He point at himself with his thumbs. “Born in the USA, all me, by the way. He’ll tell ya though: I’m _definitely_ no slouch at the bass. Love a good bass, yeah.”

“Right,” Molly blinks, nodding. She slowly backs away. “Well, good luck with all that.”

The boy smacks his forehead. “Of course. Always doing that. Probably should have started at the beginning. You humans and your beginnings. No appreciation for the _non-linear_. Well, come on.”

“What?” Molly asks again.

“Oi! Come _on!_ We haven’t got all day. Well, yeah we do. All of all the days, actually. Figure of speech, though. Rubbish, that. Bad habit. Gotta quit. Think I’ll stick to landscapes of speech. Mountain ranges of speech. Oceans of speech!”

“What the actual–” Molly Hooper starts to say. But her words vanish as the boy with the face dashes off. Which would be all well and fine if he hadn’t had grabbed her by the hand and taken her in the process. He drags them into the old police box…

_(Don’t remember that…)_

...and the quick-sharp note of fear pounding in her chest suddenly melts into pure astonishment. She’s awestruck, mouth open, eyes wide. And then she’s grinning, laughing, turning in circles to see all the bright, beautiful bigger-on-the-inside _wonder_ , overcome and amazed from her bobble hat to the peachy-pink tips of her toes.

“Geronimo, Molly-o,” the boy says.

And promptly changes her life forever.

||

“Love London,” says the boy who calls himself Doctor. He throws open the blue doors as they fly across the night. “Keeps bringing me back. Even when I hate it. Even when it hates _me_. Something. Something always brings me back here. It’s my North Star.” He pats the doors of the blue box with affection. “And my girl. My wild old friend, here. She always guides me true. ”

He leaves Molly to watch the sparkle and fade of the city spreading out into the night. It’s beautiful, but leaves her with the awkward notion that she’s both a part of something very big while being so very, very small.

She looks over her shoulder to the Doctor and finds his eyes sad and downcast. He fiddles absently with instruments of the TARDIS console like he’s trying to keep his hands busy. Like something needs doing, and he with a purpose about how to do it.

Her mind fills with memories of her father; the way he fiddled with the taps or the doorknobs after he got ill, always searching for something that needed fixing, when what needed fixing above all else was far beyond his ability to repair.

||

She’s looking out over the balcony at the lights of old Hollywood, having slipped away from Ava Gardner’s birthday party.

“Who is it?” the Doctor asks.

“Who?” Molly asks. In the low light, with her dark hair and delicate features, more than a few partygoers have mistaken her for the lovely Miss Audrey Hepburn.

“The person who makes you so sad.”

Oh. “A friend. He...died, sort of.”

The Doctor smiles. “Had a friend like that. Fell into a crack into the universe. Supposed to have blinked him out of existence. Luckily, never quite took.” The corners of his mouth rise. “Didn’t know that happened to other people.”

“I’m not sure it really does,” she shrugs, reaching for her champagne.

“Then we’re in good company, you and me, Molly Hooper.” He plops down onto a stone stair, his elbows on his knees. “Tell me about your Not Dead friend.”

She scrunches her nose, twiddles her lips, tries to find the words to do justice to Sherlock Holmes. Molly sinks to the stairs at the Doctor’s side, one below his. “He’s mad. Brilliant. Beautiful,” she says. “He hardly sees it, even though he’s got an ego the size of the sun. He can walk unseen in a crowded room and knows every detail about you with a single glance. He’s the first person Scotland Yard calls when they’re at their wit’s end, and has probably saved more lives than you could count. And he’s got a funny hat,” she beams, flicking his fez.

He grins. “Sounds stylish. And clever.”

She shakes her head. “He is. And so lonely. Always running away from the people who care about him.”

Something in his expression shifts. “I knew a man like _that_ , too,” The Doctor says. “Cleverest man. Kept trying to show everyone just how clever he was. He tried to save the world, every day. Prove his worth. To himself, most of all.”

“Where’s he now?”

He flips his sonic round once, twice, three times. “Alone,” he says. And disappears back into the party.

||

On Delphinium 7 she intercedes with an old and terrible authority, saving the life of a young Delphine whose only crime had been a chance meeting with her and The Doctor. He introduces himself as Twelvecaste 4471, Order Less Than Nothing. Molly decides he looks like a Nick.

The Delphium are a stoic people, austere and absolute. They order Less Than Nothing Nick to a swift death.

“You can’t!” Molly desperate to help her newfound friend.

“He has committed thought crimes against the Nine Greatcastes, the Seven Lesser, and the Three Less Thans,” declares an old, wizened crone called the Magistrate. She sits upon a dias and wears a dress the color of bone. “He has questioned his devotion, and for that he poses a risk to the collective. He will not accept, and so he cannot be accepted,” the Magistrate informs her. “He has forfeited his part, and for that, his life. He does not matter.”

“Every life matters!” Molly cries, tears in her eyes at Nick’s suffering. She pours out her heart on the stone floors of the Greatcaste Chambers, crying out for all who would hear the terrible injustice before them.

Across an entire planet, the lower castes of Delphinium 7 hear her pleas, and her pain.

This is how Molly Hooper starts a revolution.

||

“Sorry about Jack, by the way. He does that.”

Molly sways a little, breathless from the shocking kiss that’s just been planted on her. By a handsome man. A handsome, pansexual 51st century immortal...pirate? Something.

“‘Sokay,” she mumbles, bright red. “Could always use a good kiss.”

“That can be arranged!” Jack hollers over his shoulder.

“Oi! Not on my TARDIS! Off you pop, Harkness. Always about the mouth with you.”

Jack waggles his eyebrows suggestively. “Not always.”

“Hands off my husband,” River says, slipping her arms around the Doctor’s shoulders. “Unless you’re willing to share.”

“ _River!_ ” exclaims the Doctor.

“Oooh. Anytime, ma’am.”

“ _Jack!_ ” exclaims the Doctor.

Giggling to herself, Molly trips off in search of privacy because this is getting a bit weird, even for an open-minded, 21st century, intergalactic time-traveling girl like her.

||

Time spins on.

By day, Molly goes to work, cataloguing London’s dead and giving their families peace of mind.

By night, Molly disappears.

Molly runs.

Molly _adventures._

Someone notices.

||

Mycroft Holmes studies the surveillance photo. Impossible, and yet...

Only one person who may yet have answers. He dials a direct line known to all of seven people across the whole of United Kingdom. A female voice answers.

“Ms. Lethbridge-Stewart,” Mycroft Holmes says. “Just the person I need. How fare the ravens? Batteries working? Good, good. Though as a matter of future precaution, I might suggest looking into solar.” He leans forward, considering his file folder once more. “Now, down to business. I wonder if you’ve heard from _our physician friend_ lately.”

||

A year of what she’s starting to think of as _London Time Universal_ has gone by when she meets River Song in a bar on Sontar. The Doctor is in one of his black moods. He skulks around the TARDIS like Toby when she’s been too busy to pay him proper attention and refuses to be comforted. Molly gives up trying to coax him out of his anger. Honestly, he can be just like–

“I know who he reminds you of,” River Song says, appearing beside her. By now she knows the face of the Doctor’s wife quite well. Has heard the stories, too. The good stories, and bad, and the ones that are both, and somehow saddest of all.

“In fact I saw him just a few days ago. He was negotiating with a pair of black-market thugs in Phnom Phen.” A slow, knowing smile.“Well, I say _negotiating_ …”

Molly gulps. “You saw Sherlock? You _know_ Sherlock?”

“Darling,” River Song smiles. “Where I come from, everyone knows the story of Sherlock Holmes. The man is a legend.”

Molly lets out a shaky breath, relieved to hear Sherlock is alive (for now). She shakes her head, scoffs. Somehow she isn’t surprised to learn his name and reputation echo well into the 51st century.

Very little surprises her anymore. After an alien with the face of an art school dropout and the soul of the last of his kind grabs your hand, throws you in a time machine, and hurls you through the galaxy...Well, suffice it to say that _surprise_ rather fails to embody the emotional picture of pretty much everything to follow.

River Song holds up her glass to her lips, tosses a wink at her. “Of course, for that matter, Molly Hooper, so are _you_.”

Molly chokes on her drink.

Well. Perhaps not everything.

||

She lives a hundred lives in her time with the Doctor.

He introduces her to Joan of Arc and to Empress Theodora of the Byzantine Empire; she stands at the arm of Boudica, her battle armor gleaming, and rides the plains of North America beside Annie Oakley. She joins up with the genius girls of Bletchley Park and gets a lesson in seduction from Cleopatra herself. During a rainy Swiss summer, Mary Shelley tells her German ghost stories, and Molly provides her with anatomical details for her manuscript; Hypatia shows her the purity of reason that is first among the Neoplatonists of Alexandria; the girls of Bikini Kill make her do shots with a grubby guitarist named Kurt Cobain.

“Where to next?” she laughs, crashing through the doors of the TARDIS, stumbling and happy and twirling her Doctor with his bright red bowtie. They’re dancers in the Bolshoi one week, and stowaways on an Alliance frigate, far, far into the future, the next.

Free of secrets in her secret life, Molly Hooper contains multitudes.

||

One night they end up gatecrashing a party for theoretical luminaries at Princeton. Molly skirts around the edges, listening to snippets of conversations from a kaleidoscopic group of scientists, who drink gin martinis and argue academic arcana with the same energy and passion as she once saw Greek philosophers debate the nature of reality or American lawyers the rights of men.

Someone, she can’t hear who, postulates that within the next fifty to one hundred years all the great questions of science will be solved. That one day, not long from now, a theory would emerge that would be able to tie together everything from the gravity of electrons to the hearts of far-off galaxies.

“Hmph,” an old man says from his chair in the corner, snorting in derisive amusement. “Fool.”

“You don’t agree?” she asks, amused.

“More theories, yes. Always. More answers, yes. _Always!_ ” he declares, smacking his fist in his palm. The spiky white tips of his hair shake with the force of his emphasis. “But also always questions, questions, questions. Uncertainty. Ever will there be some manner of truth that, maybe, we cannot know.”

“I’ve always believed science offers the ultimate answers.” Molly answers after a moment’s thought.

“For some things, yes.” The great man of the great mind reaches for a mug, sips his coffee. “But others…” he turns up his palm in question.

“After all, gravity, my dear,” Albert Einstein tells her, one hot New Jersey night in 1953, “can hardly be held responsible for people falling in love.”

Beyond, in an inscrutable sky, the stars twinkle, twinkle, shine.

||

No matter how far they go, no matter what worlds they see or save or sully, as with the Doctor, something always brings her back to London. To her lab and her quiet autopsy bay. She doesn’t miss so much as a single shift, always making sure the Doctor drops her off fresh from the shower and well-rested, ready to do the work that needs doing.

That’s the truest Molly, all the way down to the her big, single, oxygen-driven heart.

Despite all she loves about traveling with the Doctor and his box of endless adventures, there are things she greatly misses about her life before. When she was content to just be the quiet, mousy girl in a basement at Barts. And though she’s no longer quite that same person, there are parts of that Molly Hooper’s life that she can't let go of; pieces that she will always long for, whether that life took place long, long ago or eons into the future. No matter if she is standing under the same sun or is a million, billion light years away—It’s just...

 _Home_.

||

“Where to next?” the Doctor shouts up. “Prehistoric Fiji? Imperial Japan? Space Canada? Best get out your wellies!”

“I know what you’ve been doing,” she announces. They’ve just returned from a strange jaunt to the very distant past of an alternate history, where an armada of spaceships lead by an inscrutable and savvy female leader was being chased across the universe by homicidal robots.

The Doctor looks up from his wiring. “What is it I’ve been doing, Molly-o,” he asks, sly.

“What you’ve been showing me. Great, imperfect minds. Strong and resourceful women.”

“Men, too.”

“Some men, too.” She swings around a stability pole. “But Doctor I think it’s time I–”

“You were a ghost,” he interrupts, sour-faced and growly. “That day we met, in the alley by the car park. A ghost, haunting your own life. Weren’t you wasted, Molly Hooper. Wasted in your own life. Waiting for a man who kept running away.”

Molly glares sonics at him. “That’s not true.”

He jumps up, looming over her, a man and king and god at once. “It is true, though.” Then he grins, that charming smile that has no doubt been the bright hope and utter downfall of so many others before her. “Come on, whaddya say?” the Doctor drawls, leaning down and taking her hands in his own. “You and me, among the stars! Across the universe.” His smile is so full of hope. “You and me, Molly-o. Forever and a day.”

Molly watches the boy who is not; his ancient eyes behind a face like youth.

There are doors in the TARDIS, she knows, that will not open. There are names he will not speak. Pictures she’s come across here and there: A pretty red-haired girl and a handsome young man. Lost to him, forever. Molly squeezes his hands. And lets them go.

The Doctor looks away, like a small child who knows he is guilty of something he ought not to have done. She’s reminded of that other man in her life; how he'd come so close to losing the people he loved and how far he'd gone to prevent that from happening. Not so different, her doctor and her detective.

The Doctor sighs. “You know, I had another friend, once. Long time ago, and not. Also needed to go off, be a doctor. A real one,” he clarifies. “Not the–

“–timey-wimey kind?” Molly says, one corner of her mouth tipping up.

He whirls his sonic, gives her a grin. “Got it one. Clever girl, Molly-o. One of the brightest. One of my best.” He smiles very, very sadly, and his face is no longer that of the mad hipster boy she followed, two years ago and a hundred more. He’s much older. And much, much sadder.

“You mean it. You really can’t keep doing this, can you?”

“I had the most lovely days with you. But I–”

He looks down. “I know. Real life. There’s...something waiting. Some _one_ waiting.”

Molly looks at him a moment, thinking. Shakes her head. “No, it’s not that. We–I’m his friend. I might never be anything more. And that’s okay. Really. But, yes, I do miss him. I miss all my friends, and my job and my fat, grumpy cat.” She squeezes his hand. “You showed me so many worlds. Gave me a glimpse at so so many lives, but it’s just–” She smiles at him shyly, awkward. "I'm not quite done with the one I’ve got. Like you told me, ages ago: London. Keeps pulling you back.”

“Yeah. Does that, London. Gets inside you, into your lungs and heart and blood. Pumping in your veins. London. London, and the Not Dead Hat Detective. I hope he knows how special you are.”

Her mouth pulls in a half smile. “Maybe. I just...saw him when no one else did. That mattered to him. Said I counted. And that’s a lot, coming from him.”

He looks at her with such fondness. “Oh, Molly Hooper. The girl who brought a world to its knees only to help it back up again. The girl who saw what no one else could. The girl who counted.” He waves a hand, shoving the levers of the TARDIS into place.

They fly. They fly through time and across all of space.

Through nebulae and galactic cores; though planetary systems just getting their start; through ancient empires crumbled down to the dust they'd risen up from. The blue box whirls and the Doctor smiles at the magic of his first companion, moving flying _dancing_ through the stars and the years, all the good and evil and beauty and terror and ordinary the universe ever had.

Then it’s morning. A London morning, rainy and cool, on another unremarkable Tuesday. And the Doctor is saying goodbye.

“Back in the world.” He makes a show of stalking about, taking in the details, checking the day and time and year. He takes a deep, restorative breath, sniffing his nose and screwing up his face. “Still smells like the Blitz. No matter how many, _how many times_ , I reboot the universe, still can’t get the Blitz to wash out!”

He sighs, looking at her, finally. “Time to go, brilliant girl. Got a good feeling about you, though. You and ya Not Dead Hat Man. And feelings don’t always sit well with me, so. You know it must be...something.”

“Spoilers,” she reminds him, quirking a sideways smile.

“Right. You met River. Forgot that. Must be getting old. Hate getting old. Means glasses and squinting. I hate squinting! You get all liney and cross.”

“You’d look good. Dashing with your bowtie.” She straightens his lapels and gives a friendly tug to his very cool bowtie.

“I’d look good. Always look good. Looking good is what I do.”

Her hands drop and she closes his larger ones in hers. “Doctor,” she hums. “I will miss you. Very much. Come visit. Please. And bring River, yeah?” she says, forcing a cheerful smile. Her voice quivers a tiny bit. There will be no more great, big whooshing adventures after this. No more TARDIS; no more Doctor.

He nods, but does not agree.“My Molly,” he says. “Are you sure?”

Behind her is the great stone bulwark of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, an institution nearly a thousand years old. Across all that time, it had been a place where the sick were comforted and medical questions asked and answered. It was a place of healing. Her own included.

She touches his shoulder. “Don’t stay away,” she says gently.

He nods. “A last favor, if you please. Pass a message along will ya? Tell Kate the Ravens looks sloshy,” he announces.

“Kate?”

“Lethbridge-Stewart. Tower of London. She’ll know. You’ve got a mutual friend. ‘The Umbrella Man.’ Sly, that one. Beat me at chess once. Well, he will, anyway. ” He waggles his eyebrows.

“Molly-o. You remember. You remember when you need to be brave and true, when you need that little extra something to hold on to. When you need some hope. The universal prayer, _I hope_. Exists in every language there is. When you need a reminder, you remember this, Molly Hooper...” With a kiss to her cheek, the Doctor whispers his final parting.

And vanishes in a whirl of light and wind and color.

||

Two days later, another madman reappears out of thin air. Her first madman, with just the one heart he pretends not to have at all. The one she’s loved since a rainy Thursday afternoon when she was twenty-seven years old, when they met for the second time and he thought he’d figured out everything there was to know about her. The man she killed two years before, and has missed ever since.

“Hello, Molly,” says Sherlock Holmes.

“It’s over, then?” she asks, coming out of her shock.

“Yes.” He says, eyes flashing over her in that whirlwind of deduction. His eyes narrow, brows worried in confusion. “You’ve changed,” he says, finally.

“It’s been two years. Haven’t you?”

That slow, building smile. He steps closer, looming above her with a softness in his eyes that she’s never found before. “Yes. I have.”

 _Geronimo_ , she thinks, remembering the Doctor’s final words.

And she kisses him hello.

||

**Author's Note:**

> Someday I will write the email correspondence between Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Mycroft Holmes re: THE RAVENS. 
> 
> Thanks for reading :)


End file.
